Sir Peter Levin Shaffer, CBE (15 May 1926 – 6 June 2016) was an English playwright and screenwriter of numerous award-winning plays, of which several have been turned into films.
It is very, very difficult for a playwright to write a scene in which a young man has his first deep experience of sex with a girl whom he found immensely attractive, is fully satisfied by this event and gets up and blinds a lot of horses.
Can you think of anything worse one can do to anybody than take away their worship?
Everything we feel is made of Time. All the beauties of life are shaped by it.
The Normal is the good smile in a child's eyes- all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults. It both sustains and kills- like a God. It is the Ordinary made beautiful; it is also the Average made leathal. The Normal is the indispensable, murderous God of Health.
Tragedy, for me, is not a conflict between right and wrong, but between two different kinds of right.
Love is the only doorway from the prison of ourselves.
Figaro is a bad play. It stirs up hatred between the classes. In France, it has caused nothing but bitterness. My own dear sister,Antoinette, writes me that she is beginning to be frightened of her own people.
The Normal is the good smile in a child’s eyes - all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults.
All my wife has ever taken from the Mediterranean - from that whole vast intuitive culture - are four bottles of Chianti to make into lamps, and two china condiment donkeys labelled Sally and Peppy.
Look. . . to go through life and call it yours - your life - you first have to get your own pain. Pain that's unique to you. You can't just dip into the common bin and say 'That's enough!'.
It's an extraordinary thing about Mozart is that you never tire of him. . . he never bores me, and he doesn't. . . not only bore me, that's too strong a word.
What was evident was that Mozart was simply transcribing music completely finished in his head. And finished as most music is never finished. Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and structure would fall. I was staring through the cage of those meticulous ink strokes at Absolute Beauty.
Worship isn't destructive, Martin. I know that. I don't. I only know it's the core of his life. What else has he got? He can hardly read. He knows no physics or engineering to make to world real for him. No paintings to show him how others have enjoyed it. No music except television jingles. No history except tales from a desperate mother. No friends. Not one kid to give him a joke, or make him know himself more moderately. He's a modern citizen for whom society doesn't exist.
What use, after all, is man, if not to teach God His lessons?
A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave.
I was born in Liverpool in England, and I lived there for the first nine years of my life.
I made, over the years in Cambridge, several very good American friends, and America appeared to me, a land of promise in every sense of that word, a land of freedom from the inhibitions and restrictions that I felt in England.
All reined up in old language and old assumptions, straining to jump clean-hoofed on to a whole new track of being I only suspect is there. I can't see it, because my educated, average head is being held at the wrong angle. I can't jump because the bit forbids it, and my own basic force - my horsepower, if you like - is too little.
Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process.
I think I did have fantasies about being an actor. In fact, I know I did.